Is this some kind of rare jewel? Or perhaps a luridly lit cave? How about a landscape from the latest fantasy video game? A computer was involved in making the image, but the subject is all too real. If this spiky terrain gives you a slightly queasy feeling, there's a reason: it's a kidney stone. Not actual size, of course, just one magnified 400 times and presented in a rainbow of false color. This image, made in 1998, is one of hundreds of specimens – animal, vegetable and mineral – shot by photographer and scientist David Scharf, a world-renowned pioneer in microscopy. For more than 30 years, Scharf, based in Los Angeles, has painstakingly documented a world that is largely unseen by the naked eye, bringing out the beauty in the grotesque.

Like most kidney stones, the one seen here is made mostly of jagged-edged calcium oxylate crystals. "You can see why they hurt so much," Scharf says. "Even at this magnification, it looks like a bunch of razor blades."...

Nothing heralds the advent of spring like a romp through a sunlit front yard. "Hula Hoop Dancing," by freelance photographer Manuello Paganelli, captures the joyful anticipation of the warm days to come. The idea for the image came spontaneously during a shoot for a Vespa scooter ad near Paganelli's home in North Hollywood, Calif. While taking a break from photographing a model in various poses on a scooter, one of his assistants suggested that Paganelli experiment with some of the playful props they had brought to the shoot, including a number of colorful hula hoops. As the model struggled to smile at the camera and keep all the hoops spinning at once, Paganelli started photographing with his Mamiya RZ67 and 90mm lens, using reflectors to enhance the available early-morning light...

Winter has a way of transforming even the most recognizable places into fairy-tale fantasies almost overnight. Just turn down the temperature a few degrees and the lush greenery of Oregon's famous Multnomah Falls suddenly resembles a scene out of Norse mythology. Photographer Janis Miglavs captured this frosty image with his medium-format Mamiya 645 camera, using Provia 100 film, during an unusually cold winter in the Portland area. "This is one of the most visited, most photographed tourist spots in the whole state of Oregon," he says. "But on that day, I was the only one around. I never saw any footprints. It was just this wonderland of snow and ice."

Miglavs is a well known adventure travel photographer who has seen some of the most exotic lands on the planet...

The sparkling new Seattle Public Library, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, was introduced in May to rave reviews for its innovative use of interior space and asymmetrical forms.

Here, Seattle photographer Jason Hasenbank adds to the disorienting nature of the building with an abstract photomosaic of the library's meshlike metal and glass skin. The image was made while Hasenbank was assisting architectural photographer Fred Housel in setting up a photo shoot of the new structure.

Ever feel like you have one too many balls in the air? How about too many office supplies? That's the mood captured here in "Balancing," by photography student Sheila Menezes.

The image won first prize in the College & University — Computer-Assisted category of the Photo Imaging Education Association's (PIEA) 2004 International Student-Teacher Photo Exhibition and Competition in January.

Menezes, a graduate student at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif., says that the title of the photo also describes the balance of her two favorite genres of photography, portraiture and still life. "It's one of my favorite images, but I find it so ironic that I won the prize with it," she admits...

With much of the country preoccupied with imminent war and a sagging economy, this topsy-turvy image from commercial photographer John Terence Turner seems appropriate for our entry into 2003.

Created for Turner's stock portfolio of motion shots, the photo is a result of trial and error, and more than a little ingenuity. He first tried to get a kinetic image of this Seattle roller coaster by riding in the seat in front of the two models and aiming his camera backward. He soon found that the safety bar was too restricting and the g-forces of the turns were too great to...

After an issue full of conflict and change, we thought we would end with an image that is as timeless as it is beautiful. On a trip to Varanasi, India, Canadian photographer Christopher Gora discovered this quiet scene of a woman sweeping out a walkway.

"During the festival season, I lived in an ancient apartment overlooking the Ganges River." Gora said. "Daily, I would get up before dawn to witness people's rituals and then pass through this archway on my way to the market. I was often struck by the play of light through the arches, but there was never anyone there to complete the space...

Spring can't come soon enough for this young whitetail deer, struggling to stand on a frozen Montana lake. The effort to rescue this exhausted yearling was covered by Robin Loznak, chief photographer at the Daily Inter Lake, a newspaper in Kalispell, Mont.

Last November, Loznak heard about a deer trapped on the slick ice of nearby Middle Foy's Lake and drove out to the scene, where he saw several workers from the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department trying to get to the animal. "The ice was only about an inch thick, so no one could walk on it," Loznak explains. "It was so smooth, the deer just couldn't get his footing at all..."